THE RISE AND SPRAWL

My latest piece in the Sunday Free Press is a friendly reminder to Winnipeg’s amateur and professional downtown boosters (at least to the professional boosters who genuinely care if downtown succeeds or not) who think that downtown renewal is a simple, aggregate demand problem. Bring enough people downtown for a few different destinations, and they’ll create a whole demand for secondary uses (bars, restaurants, hotels, retail stores), and maybe other primary uses (residences, offices).

…And all this time here you thought you were just going to a Jets game.

 It’s not that simple, and I use the Exchange District—relatively successful not in spite of, but because it has had little in the way of major public intervention in the marketplace—as an example of why.

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This all prompted my friend Luke Marvin to put together this drawing.